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See the sun as a work of art in this ultra-HD NASA video

A new video of the sun in ultra-HD shows our closest star shooting off flares and shining in all its glory.

Scientists used data collected by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory — a craft tasked with constantly keeping an eye on the sun from space — to treat space fans to detailed views of the star in multiple wavelengths of light.

It takes a team of experts about 10 hours to make each minute of the full 30-minute-long video, according to NASA.

"Every twelve seconds, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory images the sun in ten wavelengths of invisible ultraviolet light," NASA wrote in text at the start of the video. "Each wavelength is assigned a unique color and every image is eight times the resolution of HD video."

Some of the most incredible footage captured by the observatory shows huge loops of magnetic fields stretching miles above the sun. Bursts of hot plasma — called coronal mass ejections — can also be seen bursting from the sun into space in the video.

These eruptions of charged particles are occasionally directed at Earth. If this solar material slams into Earth's magnetic field, it can create a geomagnetic storm that could supercharge the northern and southern lights or, in some extreme cases, cause problems with power grids on the planet.

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